Month: October 2012

The tie between plankton and Obama’s 2008 victory

Map of red and blue sections in 2000 election

Look at this map, and notice that deep, deep in the Republican South, there’s a thin blue band stretching from the Carolinas through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. These are the counties that went for Obama in the last election….Why? Well, the best answer, says marine biologist Craig McClain, may be an old one, going back before the Civil War, before 1776, before Columbus, back more than 100 million years to the days when the Deep South was under water. Those counties, as he writes here, went for Obama because trillions and trillions and trillions of teeny sun-loving creatures died there. He’s talking about plankton. That’s why the Republicans can’t carry those counties. Blame plankton.

— Robert Krulwich, “Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin,'” Krulwich Wonders: An NPR Sciencey Blog, October 10, 2012.

Glenda Gilmore lecture on the history of education in North Carolina

We hope you’ll join us this afternoon for a free public lecture by Yale historian Glenda Gilmore. The details:

“Knowledge Capital and Human Flourishing: Educating North Carolinians, 1865–1970”
Thursday, Oct. 11, 2012
Wilson Special Collections Library
5:30 pm, Pleasants Family Assembly Room

The lecture is the keynote address for the statewide conference New Voyages to Carolina: Defining the Contours of the Old North State. Gilmore says her talk will examine “what the history of education in North Carolina has to tell us about the current school crisis.”

The lecture is sponsored by the North Carolina Collection, the Friends of the Library, the Center for the Study of the American South, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of History, the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and the Historical Society of North Carolina.

About Dr. Gilmore

Gilmore (UNC Ph.D. ’92) is the Peter V. and C. Van Woodward Professor of History at Yale. Her books include Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (W. W. Norton, 2008) and Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

For more information, contact Liza Terll, Friends of the Library, (919) 548-1203.

W.A. Simpkins and the State Fair

W.A. Simpkins exhibit at N.C. State Fair

The North Carolina State Fair is set to open for its 145th year tomorrow in Raleigh. The event has changed over the years. Electricity arrived in 1884 and the first Midway ride was erected in 1891. The first food booths opened in 1900. And the first airplane exhibit was held in 1910, almost seven years after the Wright brothers first successful flights on the Outer Banks.

One constant in the early 1900s was an exhibit by William Alonzo Simpkins. The Wake County native boasted of his Simpkins Prolific Cotton Seed, which was reported to double yields and have strong resistance to the boll weevil.

Born in 1868, Simpkins worked as a manager on the cotton and truck farm of V.C. Royster. He remained there for several years, according to Moses N. Amis’s Historical Raleigh, “proving himself to be most industrious, highly capable, and a man thoroughly familiar with his business in all its details.”

Simpkins eventually began farming on his own, working land about two miles southwest of Raleigh. As Amis wrote in 1913, Simpkins’ farms were “models, in all respects, of agricultural skill, and exemplify in an eminent degree the high perfection to which agriculture may be brought when under the care and supervision of a master mind and hand.”

In 1907 Simpkins was awarded a gold medal at the Jamestown Exposition for his truck crop. According to an obituary in the January 26, 1941 edition of the Raleigh News and Observer, the medal proved one of Simpkins’ most prized possessions.

Stalk of Simpkins Prolific cotton

Amis records that one of the keys to the success of Simpkins Prolific Cotton Seed was the plant’s maturation before the emergence of boll weevils each year. “The Prolific is exclusively planted by the North Carolina A. & M. College [later known as North Carolina State University] on its cotton farm, and for the past seven years has taken first premium on best stalks, best seed, best lint and best acre,” he wrote.

Postcard for W.A. Simpkins cotton

A contest Simpkins held annually at the State Fair may help explain the caption in the postcard above. He offered $15-$35 prizes to Wake County boys who produced the best cotton and the single stalk with the greatest number of bolls. Could S.J. Betts, mentioned in the caption above, be a boy who didn’t win the prize? If so, Simpkins clearly placed self-promotion above a gentle encouragement of the young. Perhaps, instead, Betts was actually Batts (see other exhibitor in top postcard). In that case, Simpkins was engaging in the ages-old practice of business–deride your competition. Of course, both explanations may be wrong. What do you think?

In addition to farming and seed sales, Simpkins devoted himself to his church. He served as a minister to a host of Primitive Baptist churches in North Carolina and Virginia for more than 25 years. Simpkins died on January 24, 1941, eight months after suffering his fourth stroke. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.

UNC’s Dialectic and Philanthropic Society Presents The Annual Kemp Plummer Battle Lecture

If you’re interested in finding out more about Carolina this University Day, consider attending the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies’ annual Kemp Plummer Battle lecture.

Governor James E. Holshouser, Jr., will deliver the lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, October 12, in the Hanes Art Center auditorium. The lecture will focus on University history and traditions. A reception will follow the lecture.

Holshouser’s victory in November 1972 marked the first election of a Republican governor in North Carolina in the 20th century. The Watauga County native served in office from 1973 to 1977. He currently serves as member emeritus of UNC’s Board of Governors.

Isaac Warshauer, the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies’ Joint Senate Historian, will also lead a guided tour of the University at 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 12. The tour will begin in front of South Building on the Polk Place side and will last roughly an hour.

For more information and to RSVP to the lecture, visit the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies’ website.

Everything fried! Recipes from the collection.

In honor of the North Carolina State Fair opening this Thursday, we offer recipes of everything fried.

“Fried Apple Pies”

“Fried Green Tomatoes” from Dixie Classic Fair for Northwest North Carolina: Favorite Recipes from Friends of the Fair.

“French Fried Onion Rings” from Recipes for Gourmet Eating: A Compilation of Favorite Tested Recipes of Housewives of Greenville and Out of Town Friends.

“Fried Potatoes”

“Fried Corn Bread” from A Taste of the Old and the New.

“Okra Fritters” from Columbus County Cookbook II.

“Fried Chicken” from Carolina Cooking.

“Cocktail Fritters” from High Hampton Hospitality.

Check out what’s new in the North Carolina Collection.

Several new titles just added to “New in the North Carolina Collection.” To see the full list simply click on the link in the entry or click on the “New in the North Carolina Collection” tab at the top of the page. As always, full citations for all the new titles can be found in the University Library Catalog and they are all available for use in the Wilson Special Collections Library.

His grand design: Holding San Francisco for ransom

On this day in 1864: Capt. James Iredell Waddell of Pittsboro, assigned by the Confederacy to cripple the Northern economy by sea, sails from England.

He will take the clipper ship Shenandoah as far as Australia, then head north, burning and scuttling ships as he goes. In the Bering Strait he burns eight American whalers.

More than two months after Appomattox, the ship Shenandoah will fire perhaps the last shot of the Civil War — at an American whaling ship off the coast of Alaska.

Waddell’s next plan was to sail into San Francisco and hold the city for ransom, but en route he encounters a British ship bearing newspaper accounts of the war’s end. Realizing he faces possible piracy charges, Waddell disguises the Shenandoah as a merchant vessel and sets sail for England, where he turns it over to British authorities.

 

‘The natural habitat of the North Carolina Babbitt’

“Industrial progress in North Carolina is primarily of the Piedmont. Cotton and tobacco factories dot this section, and from it comes most of the new noise.

“The Piedmont is the natural habitat of the North Carolina Babbitt. Over it the boosters swarm.

“But from the point of view of charm, the Piedmont is the state’s most barren region. It is loud-mouthed and bustling, and only too much like a displaced section of the Middle West. Its aim is to become indistinguishable from Michigan. God willing, that high aspiration will probably be achieved within the next 10 years.”

— From “North Carolina” by Raleigh newspaperwoman  Nell Battle Lewis in the American Mercury (May 1926)

 

Searching for Early Uses of “Tar Heels”

The origin of the nickname “Tar Heel” is one that comes up often whenever North Carolinians are talking with visitors from out of state. Like many colloquialisms, a precise origin is hard to pin down as the nickname was probably used in informal conversation long before it ever appeared in print. But that doesn’t stop us from trying.

The best history of the Tar Heel nickname is William S. Powell’s “Why We’re All Called Tar Heels,” available on the North Carolina Collection website. While it’s unclear how early the term was used, we can say authoritatively that it came into regular use during the Civil War when it was applied to soldiers from North Carolina. Whether or not Robert E. Lee actually said “God bless the Tar Heel boys,” the name stuck. Powell and others cite a piece of sheet music published in Baltimore in 1866 as being likely the first printed use of the term “Tar Heel.”

Now that we have digitized versions of many early North Carolina newspapers available online, we have the opportunity to easily search thousands of pages of text — far easier than scrolling through that many pages on microfilm. Even though the optical character recognition software doesn’t do a great job of transcribing early newspapers accurately, I was able to find a couple of uses of “Tar Heel” prior to 1866.

The earliest one I came across was an ad in the Fayetteville Observer published on March 27, 1864 asking for recruits of “brave ‘Tar Heels’.”

In a later issue of the same paper, published on July 21, 1864, we see that the term was in use among the soldiers themselves. One of the Cumberland Plough Boys wrote to the readers back home about conditions in camp and assured friends back home ” that ‘Tar Heels’ do not intend to be subjugated.”

One of the most frustrating things about this kind of research using digitized newspapers is that we have no easy way of knowing what we’re missing. Because we rely on computers to do the transcription there are many mistakes, especially for older papers where there might be irregular printing or smudges or torn pages. But it is a start, and goes a long way toward making these invaluable resources more accessible and easier to use than ever.

Now if only we can figure out the origin of the term Cackalacky.